At the close of this first session of
the Thirty-ninth Congress, which showed the great divergence between the executive and
legislative branches of the government, and which also included the beginning of a darker
and more revengeful period of reconstruction for the South, it is necessary to take a
retrospective view of certain conditions not already considered. When Congress met in
December, 1865, the president accompanied his message with a report of a tour which
General Grant had made through the South during the latter part of November preceding the
assembling of Congress. This, report, coming from the highest possible authority,
confirmed the president as to the correctness of his message in regard to the feeling of
the people of the South. It was to this effect:
With the approval of the president and secretary
of war, I left Washington on the 27th of last month for the purpose of making a tour of
inspection in the Southern States .... I am satisfied that the mass of thinking men of the
South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith .... There is universal
acquiescence in the authority of the general government .... My observations lead to the
conclusion that they [the citizens of the Southern States]are anxious to return to
self-government within the Union as soon as possible; that they are in earnest in wishing
to do what they think is required by the government, not humiliating to them as citizens,
and if such a course was pointed out they would pursue it in good faith.
General Grant could not have given a more
correct or accurate statement as to the animus of the people of the South in the winter of
1865. His testimony in reference to the Freedmen's bureau, obtained during that same trip,
is of most valuable character, showing the estimate of its workings as noted by a man not
a politician, but a great soldier, and one who was most instrumental in attaining success
to the Union armies. From conscientious agents administering the workings of the bureau,
he learned that the "belief widely spread among the freedmen of the Southern States
that the lands of their former owners will at least in part be divided among them, came
from agents of this bureau. This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of
the freedmen to make contracts for the coming year.... Many, perhaps the majority of the
agents of the bureau, advise the freedmen that by their own industry they must expect to
live ....
In some instances, I am sorry to say, the
freedman's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that he had a right to live
without care or provision for the future. The effect of this belief in the division of
lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns and cities." This is as General
Grant saw it in the winter of 1865, and under the act extending and enlarging the scope
and powers of the bureau, it was ten times worse afterward. He evidently then saw the
drift of the work of the bureau and the aim and object of the agents. Nearly every agent
became a politician in the near future and was a candidate for office. Under the
congressional reconstruction they were elected to nearly all of the Federal, State and
county offices by virtue of their influence over the ignorant negroes, and in effecting
the organization of "Union League" clubs.
It was to the interest of the agents to create
distrust and suspicion on the part of the negroes toward all Southern whites, and to cause
them to look only to themselves (the agents) for justice and their rights. So long as they
could cause friction, encourage idleness by raising false hopes of support and obtaining
lands from the government, and create the impression that their rights could only be
obtained through them, it would prolong the necessity of their offices being continued.
All this unsettling work was done through men nearly all of whom were not born in the
South and had never been citizens of the South, but who had all the prejudices and bad
blood of the times toward the South.